FAQ 6.10

 

How do you explain Old Testament accounts of prophets ordering massacres?

 

The following are some questions sent in by a reader: “I wondered if Jeremy Griffith has an explanation for instances in the Bible of prophets ordering the slaughter of children and infants? I’m not referring to King Herod’s ‘slaughter of the innocents’ in his attempt to kill Baby Jesus but more to situations such as Samuel and the Amalekites in the Bible where the prophet Samuel told Saul, the King of Israel, to ‘not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants’.”

 

Jeremy Griffith’s response:

I think I’ve written somewhere about Moses on the journey of the Israelites to Canaan having to determinedly defend themselves against tribes who attacked them, but at the moment I can’t find it.

Basically, as I explain in my writings, great prophets like Abraham, Moses, Plato and Christ knew how exceptional their sound innocence was, and thus how in desperate need the human race was for their guidance. The responsibility that this awareness of their mission gave them was absolutely extreme. They simply could not afford to allow it to be side-tracked or undermined—because again, the survival of the human race depended on their help. All of which means they had to be extremely loving and sensitive but at the same time extremely determined and tough.

In Moses’s case, as I explain in my writings, with his Ten Commandments he was giving the human race the formula to live by that would and has enabled the human race to continue on its immensely heroic but immensely upsetting search for knowledge, ultimately for understanding of the corrupted human condition.

So the fledgling Israelite nation, which was going to be the carrier of this Ten Commandment management system for the human race, had to first of all escape their persecution in Egypt, then survive the long 40 year journey through the desert to Canaan. At every step along the way Moses knew and taught his leaders to never, under any circumstances, allow their great mission to be threatened. Hence when the Israelites were repeatedly attacked by their arch enemies, the Amalekites, Moses knew they would have to match the ferociousness of the Amalekites’ attacks with equal or stronger ferocity.

From 1 Samuel 15:1-3: ‘Samuel said to Saul, “I am the one the LORD sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the LORD. This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys’.”’

And this is a relevant quote from www.christianity.com/wiki/people/who-amalek-bible.html: “Amalek in the Bible is a figure and the name of a group of people described as descendants of Esau, Jacob’s brother. The Amalekites, the people of Amalek, are often depicted as Israel’s persistent enemies throughout the biblical narrative. Throughout the Bible, the people of Israel were no strangers to adversity. Surrounded by rival nations, hostile neighbors, and expanding world empires, the people of Israel were harassed, threatened, and attacked on every side. The Amalekites were a nomad tribe living in desert area between Mount Seir and Egypt, south of Cannan. They were the first people to directly challenge the Israelites as they left Egypt and remained foes of God’s people. For generations, the Amalekites would be a thorn in the Israelites’ side, raiding the southern territories and allying with other nations to weaken their rivals. However, by declaring war on God’s people, the Amalekites declared war against the God of Israel, marking themselves for eventual destruction.”

And this is another relevant quote from F. Essay 39: Christ explained: “Yes, Christ wasn’t a pseudo idealistic false prophet pretending to be a soft, sensitive and loving person, as pseudo idealists like to portray Christ as being in order to identify with him (pseudo idealism is explained in my booklet Death by Dogma: The biological reason why the Left is leading us to extinction, and the solution), rather he was a sound, strong person whose central talent was to defy all the dishonest, bullshit, denial coming from both the human-condition-avoiding mechanistic world, and deluded pseudo idealistic world—a point the prophet Kahlil Gibran was making when he wrote, ‘Humanity looks upon Jesus the Nazarene as a poor-born who suffered misery and humiliation with all of the weak. And He is pitied, for Humanity believes He was crucified painfully…​And all that Humanity offers to Him is crying and wailing and lamentation. For centuries Humanity has been worshipping weakness in the person of the saviour. The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of strength. Jesus never lived a life of fear, nor did He die suffering or complaining…​He lived as a leader; He was crucified as a crusader; He died with a heroism that frightened His killers and tormentors. Jesus was not a bird with broken wings; He was a raging tempest who broke all crooked wings. He feared not His persecutors nor His enemies. He suffered not before His killers. Free and brave and daring He was. He defied all despots and oppressors. He saw the contagious pustules and amputated them…​He muted evil and He crushed Falsehood and He choked Treachery’ (‘The Crucified’, The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran, 1951, pp.231-232 of 902).”

And in paragraph 1132 of my book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, I present this quote from the exceptional denial-free-thinking prophet Sir Laurens van der Post to evidence the importance of maintaining freedom from oppression in the human journey to enlightenment: ‘I hope a war is not declared by anybody in the modern world because I don’t see the real necessity for war, but I would like to say that I think it would be immoral—it would be obscene—not to be ready at any moment to defend ourselves…If somebody should impose war upon us, attack us, I hope that we should have the will and the power and the moral courage to realise that life, freedom, are gifts from God and creation and our duty to defend. There’s a wonderful episode in the life of Buddha where a group of villagers in the Himalayas did not defend themselves against a band of brigands who attacked and killed many of them, and he rebuked them because he said that was not what his teaching was about, that was not reverence for life of which he was speaking…it is a moral duty for us all to be ready to defend ourselves and our freedoms’ (presentation by Laurens van der Post at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 9 Dec. 1982; see www.fixtheworldsources.com/163).

In conclusion I might mention that, as I’ve described in my writings, in my case I’ve never allowed anyone to threaten my vision of bringing understanding of the human condition to the world. At times I’ve had to fight my attackers with more strength than I actually have, suffering ten years of chronic fatigue after our project’s successful and biggest defamation court case in Australia’s history at the time, against the two biggest left-wing media organisations in Australia. As everyone who knows me will attest, I am meek and mild for nearly all the time, but when my project of bringing understanding of the human condition is threatened, I turn to steel!